The best ice cream in Toronto probably wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for a fudge recipe. Ed Francis’s mother’s fudge wasn’t the cheap stuff you make with icing sugar. It was real stovetop fudge, the kind you need to dote over with a thermometer. Ed made it properly. And because he did, his ice cream blew up.

It was the year 2000 when Ed signed a lease on the building that was to become his new ice cream parlour. Turn of the millennium. A time of change, not least for a guy from Toronto who had dreams of slinging sweet treats and sugar cones. Ed worked in computers — a self-professed geek, he built package-switch networks, and worked in Boston for the company that wrote the code for ARPANET, the network that became the internet. But when he and his wife bought a house in the Beaches, on the east end of town, he lamented the fact that you couldn’t get a decent scoop of ice cream in the neighbourhood. You had to drive to Greg’s, way out by the ROM. So Ed abandoned computers, and started Ed’s Real Scoop.

Ed’s was supposed to open in the spring, which is when you would expect an ice cream parlour to do big business. But he got the building early, so he went ahead and opened in November, which is when you would expect an ice cream parlour to be dead. And at first it was. Ed eked out enough to pay the rent by selling stuff his mom used to make. She used to make a lot of fudge.

Ed Francis at his Leslieville location.Courtesy of Ed Francis

In January, a reporter from the Toronto Star happened by, and asked Ed if they could print the fudge recipe in the weekend edition. He said sure. They ran it on Sunday across half a page. “Suddenly I was selling fudge hand over fist,” Ed remembers, sitting with me recently at his second parlour, in Leslieville. “People would see the ice cream when they came in for the fudge, and on the first warm day of the year, I was lined up down the block.”

He’s still lined up down the block — all weekend, every evening, all summer long, at his three parlours in the Beaches, Leslieville and Roncesvalle. As long as it isn’t raining, there are families standing outside of Ed’s Real Scoop, waiting for a cup or a cone. It’ll be 20 years next November since Ed Francis ditched the World Wide Web and gave the ice cream business a go. It was never a sure thing, selling ice cream in Canada, where it’s cold eight months of the year. He made it, though. Mostly because he did it right. After all this time, the lineups speak for themselves.

Things were different when he first opened, even in the realm of frozen desserts. Maybe especially in the realm of frozen desserts. In the late 1990s, you might recall, junk food was in a pretty dismal state. This was the era of Slim Jims and Crystal Pepsi, of stale convenience-store candy bars and warmed-over Boston Creams. People didn’t take the sweets they ate very seriously. “When I said I wanted to make special, homemade ice cream, people thought I was crazy,” Ed says. “But I caught the beginning of a wave.”

The 2000s ushered in a new era of snacking — of gourmet confections, deluxe treats. Fancy cupcakes. Red velvet. Crack pie. Suddenly, everyone seemed to care about food. Even desserts. “Before 2000, no one was a foodie,” he explains. “Then everyone was a foodie.”

The dawn of the foodie made it possible for Ed’s to find success, because it furnished him with an audience of receptive diners who could appreciate the fine quality of his cones. And it’s been a boon for other scoop shops around the country that pride themselves on their product.

Kawartha Dairy, up in Bobcaygeon, serves their local cottage country and sells their fine ice cream at outposts across Ontario, and in small tubs at grocery stores all over. In Belleville, Ont., there’s the legendary Reid’s Dairy, which makes superb ice cream and milk products that it sells across the city and the surrounding region. On the other side of the country, Earnest Ice Cream delights from four scoop shops around Vancouver, and is available at retail across the city; Cold Comfort, in Victoria, sells small-batch cones and ice cream sandwiches that have been acclaimed nationwide. There are towns all over Canada with shops like Ed’s.

Changing tastes were a windfall for traditional creameries and ice cream parlours that cared to make a superlative product. But they also provided an incentive for a whole lot of second-rate competitors to emerge with the hope of capitalizing on the trend. Ed knows better than practically anyone that ice cream fads tend to be shorter-lived than fast fashion. But the fly-by-night brevity of such fancies hardly stops new ones from popping up and becoming ubiquitous every couple of years.

Remember five or six years ago, when you couldn’t walk two blocks without running into one of those soft-serve frozen yogurt places where you sprinkle candies on your froyo in little tubs? Menchie’s is a bit of a ghost town these days. What about ice cream tacos, or Thai ice cream rolls? Have you had one of those frozen balls of ice cream, mochi, all the craze right now, from Japan?

Ed’s Real Scoop, behind the scenes.Courtesy of Ed Francis

When Sweet Jesus opened up in Toronto, in the summer of 2015, Ed saw the lines. People wanted to take a picture of the lunatic monstrosities they churned out there, all gussied up with colourful gewgaws and stacked higher than the top of your head. The thing is, the ice cream wasn’t actually much good. “It’s all marketing,” Ed says. “The product is average — it’s soft serve rolled in candy and stuff.” And it’s the same with pretty much all of these trendy things. “Right now it’s La Diperie, where they dip the ice cream in chocolate.” Last summer it was iHalo Krunch, the charcoal-infused soft serve that comes out black. “When the black soft serve came in, I thought, well, I can make black ice cream. You just get some food-grade charcoal,” Ed says. “But then I thought, no, I don’t want to get up in fads.”

Fads are fine. It can be nice to be fashionable. But what Ed would prefer is simply to be good. “My thing has always been high quality,” he says. “There’s always a market for that.”

You’ll notice that it’s a little quieter outside of Sweet Jesus and iHalo Krunch these days. No big lines like there were two or three years ago. The trends have passed. People don’t want ice cream that’s black or ice cream that’s covered in stuff, it seems. They want ice cream that’s good. “More often than not, people buy those things, take pictures for Instagram, and then throw it in the garbage,” Ashley Chapman laughs. “Sweet Jesus and all that, we see it as one of those gimmicky things that doesn’t have a lot of staying power.” Ashley is the VP of Chapman’s Ice Cream, the largest producer of independent ice cream in the country. You know Chapman’s: It’s the one that comes in big two-litre tubs and cardboard boxes, a fixture eternally of the grocery store’s frozen food aisles. It’s not just the ice cream parlour that has changed a lot over the last 20 years. It’s the entire ice cream business, as Chapman knows better than anybody else.

“You can buy a two-foot cone with 52 types of candy stuck to it and eight kinds of sauce and pay $18 for it, or you can buy two litres of our highest-quality premium ice cream for $5.49,” he says. “It’s fun to take a picture with that kind of stuff, but there’s no competition.”

Chapman’s is a national institution, but it’s also a family business. “I don’t think it could be any more of a family business,” he tells me. Ashley’s mother and father, Penny and David Chapman, started the company in 1973 in Markdale, Ont., when they bought the St. Clair Creamery where they had been working behind the counter and began to sell ice cream directly to grocery stores. Ashley, now 40, effectively runs the business, while his mom and dad still come into work five days a week. His wife, Lesya Chapman, is in charge of public relations and communications. It’s an enormous company. Yet, it feels remarkably small, talking to Ashley.

People are always telling him how much they love Chapman’s — and how much they loved it as kids. It’s that kind of brand. “People always tell me, ‘Oh, I remember going to grandma’s house to eat your Tiger Tail ice cream,’” he says. “Everyone I meet who finds out what I do has a story.” That element of nostalgia — of fondly reminiscing about a favourite childhood treat — is still a major driver of sales for the company. They still sell now what they sold back then.

Like Ed, Ashley has seen his share of fads emerge and seem to dominate — if only briefly. The real estate in the frozen aisle is scarce, and it can be frustrating to watch as precious shelves that should be filled with grape lollipops and tubs of inexpensive neapolitan are given over to bizarre stuff that happens to momentarily be in vogue. “The market’s absolutely insane right now,” Ashley explains. “There are fruit-based ice creams. Keto ice creams. The vegan trend. There are all these crazy concepts, and the one thing they all share in common is they don’t taste good. I see a lot of room in the stores where I could be putting my products, and they are now dedicated to these speciality products that don’t taste any good!”

Will any of it last? It’s hard to know whether a craze like Halo Top — a lower calorie alternative to traditional ice cream — will have staying power or will vanish into the ether of failed desserts. Ashley is naturally skeptical. “Guaranteed a lot of these things are going to die,” he says.

The upstart ice cream ventures themselves don’t like to think of themselves as not long for this world. Sam Arif, co-owner of La Diperie, insists that his ice cream “definitely doesn’t fall into the fad category,” and that while “our cones are beautiful,” they nevertheless “taste good too.” “Like any other market, our product evolves with consumer tastes,” Arif says. “As long as ice cream and chocolate are around, La Diperie will be, too.”

Chapman’s classic Lolly.Courtesy of Chapman's

Ice cream fads tend toward the more extravagant: Weird flavours, eclectic tastes. And yet what sells, most consistently, is the simple stuff. The classics. For Chapman’s, that means vanilla, straight-up. Vanilla is the best-selling ice cream flavour that the company makes, and it’s not even close. “We sell a lot of ice cream. We sell a lot of economy lollies. That stuff will never die. Ice cream sandwiches, vanilla — it’s the number-one selling product we make. We literally cannot make enough ice cream sandwiches every year to fulfill the needs of Canadians. It’s crazy,” Ashley says. “The trendy products, the fancy stuff, that’s all nice. But the volume, and the loyalty, is for ice cream that Canadians know and love and want more than anything else.”

Ed would likely agree with Ashley. But he’ll also tell you that one of his most popular flavours is Burnt Marshmallow. Just imagine how “burnt marshmallow would have sounded to the soda jerk at the drugstore circa 1949. Back at Real Scoop, Ed is telling me about a niche treat they make once in a while, for the younger crowd, called Maple Bacon Crunch. He’s had more luck with it than some of his other curios, such as Sweet Corn or Sour Cream. (“I renamed that Cream Cheese, and it sold better,” he says.) But mid-conversation a woman strolls over to our table and feels compelled to interrupt. “May I add my two cents?” she more says than asks. “Callebaut. More Callebaut.”

What’s Callebaut? “It’s a really lovely chocolate flavour,” she explains. Unfortunately Ed is fresh out this afternoon. “It’s hard,” Ed tells me. “We have probably 150 recipes we make. We’ve got room here for 44, counting the gelatos. You have to rotate, and people are unhappy if they come in and their favourite flavour isn’t here. The more flavours you add, the more people are unhappy.”

It’s a sign that, even for the traditionalists, ice cream has clearly evolved. What seems traditional now hasn’t always been the norm, and as Arif made clear with La Diperie, the business will always make room, over time, for growth and change. Who’s to say some of the wackier ice cream fads, the styles and flavours that seem utterly fleeting, won’t be as ordinary in 2088 as an ice cream sandwich is now?

Whether they realize it or not, parlours like Ed’s and producers like Chapman’s aren’t a bastion of the militant old guard. They are receptive to new ideas, and they adapt — they just don’t chase trends desperately. What matters, at heart, is quality. It’s not the novelty factor that keeps people coming back to line up in front of Ed’s every night, or that drives people to pluck a pint of Chapman’s from the freezer aisle. It’s consistency. It’s the sense that when you get this stuff, you know what it’ll be like, and what it’ll be like is great. “It’s like restaurants,” Ed reflects. “Restaurants that make high-quality food will always be around, even if the chef doesn’t do the latest thing. That’s my whole thing. I want to be around for a while.”

“People, especially younger people, want to try different things,” admits Ashley. “You can have your wasabi mayo ice cream, if that’s what you want. It’s a culinary adventure. More power to you. But I’m convinced that after you try these things a couple of times, you’ll tire of it. You’ll want a bowl of vanilla ice cream.”

People might try an avocado ice cream, or whatever, where they might not have 20 years ago. But the basic desire, the widespread affection, the need for nostalgia remains the same. Or as Ed asks, rather economically, “How many scoops of avocado ice cream are you really going to sell?”